The Gathering of Clouds
by caffeineaddict13
Summary: J/B/E oneshot. Bella doesn't run from the storm.


**Disclaimer**: Twilight (Stephenie Meyer), If Winter Ends (Bright Eyes), I Made a Mistake (Charles Bukowski). None of which is me.

- _one _-

There is a story that hasn't been told. Not yet.

In the desert, a girl holds her mother's hands and whispers as the sun appears from behind the endless hills, tinted orange from sand and streaming red like the scars that will one day trace her body.

"You know what they say about red skies," her mother says, and begins to hum softly in the heat.

The girl doesn't know, but she doesn't say this out loud. There is some part of her that realizes that a storm is coming, and when the hairs stand up at the back of her neck, she tries her best to ignore it.

Eventually, though, all storms have to break.

Eventually, all stories need to be told.

She closes her eyes and listens to the sea begin to turn.

--

_Dreaming, dreaming, I'm dreaming, I'm dead, it's building, falling, crashing –_

- _two _-

In the dark, everything seems more real. Monsters hide between hanging coats in the closet, underneath the shiny pink of a comforter, in between the baskets of laundry sitting on the floor.

Whispered secrets are often more binding when they are told in the dark. This is one reason why it's so easy to trust Edward Cullen.

The lights go out, but Bella doesn't hold her breath. She puts her arms out and feels the walls, cold under her touch, her heart beating like a rabbit running from its predator as night falls in the woods.

Edward takes her hand in his, tells her stories that only exist in the books she no longer reads. And because it is so dark, she believes him.

Eventually, she will look back on that moment and try to recall the difference between monsters and dreams. They twist together now more than ever, and when the definition becomes something she can no longer understand, she will stick the phrase to other things and call it a day.

- _three _-

Jacob gives her a Bright Eyes CD for Christmas, the year the sun starts to rise again.

_Just get me past this dead and eternal snow_, it says, _'cause I swear that I'm dying, slowly but it's happening_.

She thinks it funny that, ironically, the dead are what keep her alive.

_And say, and lie to me, and say, and lie to me, and say it's going to be alright_.

"If winter ends," Jacob tells her, sitting on the edge of his car, "I'll take you home."

"I give myself three days to feel better," Bella smiles, and lets him hold her, but she thinks that maybe he's missing the point.

- _four _-

Back in Arizona, there is a different boy. He has brown hair and a pretty mouth and he doesn't know about the magic that exists between the places that normal people tread.

He does, however, remember being ten years old and lonely. He remembers a girl with big brown eyes telling him that he was beautiful. And now there is a place in his heart that he keeps for her, wherever she is – a place where she can come back to, even if she doesn't realize it's there.

The girl doesn't know about the people she has touched. Some part of her needs to be loved – the same way that all people do – and on the nights when she misses the desert and her mother's voice, it beats in the same tune as the quiet boy in Phoenix.

--

"_I don't believe in ghost stories," she says._

"_Well," he replies, "I'm no ghost."_

- _five _-

Bella remembers a perfect day as the days she spent with Edward. In the calm of the storm, the perfect silence of greys and blues before all hell breaks loose, she cannot imagine anything better.

It is one of these such days, her head lying in Edward's lap, his fingers cool on her forehead, that her filter is suddenly shut off.

"I worry about Charlie sometimes," she says, a mouse's voice that she knows he can hear. "He stares at the oven when I'm cooking like he's imaging someone else. And he's so alone all the time – if it weren't for Billy Black he wouldn't even have any friends. He's…isolated." Bella blushes, hiding her face in the folds of Edward's shirt. "I'm probably imagining some of it," she whispers. "But it's there all the same."

The hundred-year-old boy presses his lips against her forehead. "I wouldn't be too concerned, love," he tells her. "It sounds like you, I suppose. And you're certainly not alone."

The sky cracks – and, just for a second, Bella is small again, lost in the thunder. It doesn't take long for the rain to clear, but she will never forget what it feels like to drown.

- _six _-

Sometimes, in the after-days of her eclipse, when the push-pull of lovers becomes too much, Bella imagines what it would be like.

Had she stayed with her mother and Phil.

Had she never met Edward Cullen, and never gotten broken.

Had Jacob Black never pieced her back together.

Had Edward stayed away, oblivious to the destruction he had caused.

Had the world stopped turning the precise moment she realized that she was stuck between two goods – because it would probably be easier if it were two evils, instead.

She imagines Pandora's box, only it's backwards. She holds twin cases in her hands – one gold in the sunlight, the other silver in the dark. She opens them on the count of three and she is rich and beautiful and famous – until she reaches the end, and she has to make a choice.

That, she realizes, is the hope. The phantom left over when everything else is gone: silent, unassuming, and, eventually, the most important piece of it all.

Decision.

--

_I keep searching the streets for that blood-wine battleship she drives with a weak battery, and the doors hanging from broken hinges…_

- _seven _-

"Heat," Bella replies honestly, when Jacob asks her what she misses most about her old home. He chuckles, takes her hand and presses it against his forehead.

"It's your lucky day, then," he says.

"I scream for sunlight," she breathes softly, more to herself than to him. Jacob hears anyway – he lifts her head up till their eyes meet under the shadows of the garage.

"I'll take you there," he tells her.

She doesn't have the heart to tell him she's already arrived.

She thinks: _I know that's impossible now_.

She thinks: _Just get me out of here_.

She whispers, "Lie to me."

_- eight_ -

There is a story that hasn't been told.

In the aftermath of a storm, there is a girl. She's hard to pick out among the wreckage, sunken in piles of rotting wood and weather-beaten houses and broken glass and the bodies of those that didn't survive. She is there, however – if you look hard enough.

This is the girl that was once never able to be alone. Once upon a time, she was loved, held, _coveted_ – and, in the end, it wasn't the storm that made this all disappear.

There is a girl who is broken and beaten and torn. Her hair is chopped short and her skin pallid, her face is sunken and her eyes shift uneasily around the ruins.

There is a girl – not a lover, a mother, a friend, a savior, a conscience; just a girl – who stood in the eye of the storm. And there is a girl who walked away.

She opens her eyes and watches as the sea begins to turn again.


End file.
